Below is an example of an editing project for my Technical Editing class. The directions were as follows:

Project 2: Editing Online with Justifications

For Project 2, you are to edit a paper online for a professor who plans to submit the paper to a journal for publication. Here is the scenario:

It’s early Thursday afternoon, and Professor Mohammed Ettouney is in a panic. He has completed a near-final draft of a paper to be submitted to the journal Manufacturing Engineering, only to lose the draft when his computer crashed this morning (no backup, naturally). Professor Ettouney has a hard copy of this most recent draft, however, and he has quickly scanned it into a Word file (no time for corrections, of course). He has asked you to edit the paper.

Professor Ettouney also asks you, as a special favor, to compile a list of substantive changes to the document and accompanying explanations for those changes. He is an ESL writer and speaker who was planning to ask you to edit the paper anyway, and he is looking for specific strategies and rules that will help him improve his writing in English. He knows that between his ESL status and the errors introduced by the scanner, you have quite a job in front of you.

You should plan to provide Professor Ettouney with the following items:

Cover letter (formal business letter format) that acts as a tutorial. Describe what you see are three of Professor Ettouney’s biggest challenges as an ESL writer and suggest specific strategies he can use to meet these challenges. Also describe your editing methodology.
List of 40 different changes and accompanying explanations. These explanations must not be along the lines of “it sounds better this way” or “I like my way more than the way you did it.” You must have a specific reason for suggesting each change, and you may not make the same change twice. Use the Comments feature in Word for your explanations, and write them in error-free, complete sentences.
Edited document (done in Word with Track Changes [or manual equivalent]: underline for new text, strikethrough for deleted text).